


clearcutting

by portions_forfox



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-18
Updated: 2012-08-18
Packaged: 2017-11-12 09:22:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/489304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/portions_forfox/pseuds/portions_forfox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Falling in love is the problem.</p>
            </blockquote>





	clearcutting

**Author's Note:**

> Written for jezabel's prompt at softly_me's Waxing Poetic ficathon: _I grew up watching your hands / arrange space, / so I find it very natural / that when you shade your eyes, / the sky is altered._

**First**.  
  
Somewhere deep in an English forest there’s a tree. A tall tree, maybe, and an old one. On a quiet Saturday a lumberjack plods softly through the woods and cuts it down, swift gray sword and home for supper. Soon there is a house.  
  
The house is rooted firmly in the ground, slabs of wood, the shades of trees planted deep beneath the tawny crust of the earth. The ground is made of dirt and greens and inside the thick layers of soil there are roots, small, thin, brown. And each root buds into a shiny jasmine blade of grass, lined up all in a row until grass becomes lawn.  
  
And beside the lawn there lies a thicket, a jungle of blooming buds and tangled vines, and the whole of these tangles is called a garden.  
  
And in that garden there lands a little blue box.  
  
  
  
  
**Second**.  
  
There is a little girl with hair like fire whose mother and father are dead. The little girl is young and brave, smart and pretty and alone.  
  
She turns up the sharp edges of her smile, dangles her hair across the kitchen counter. "Bobby Newton showed me a magic trick today," she tells her aunt, hands tracing cracks in the marble. "I believe in magic."   
  
Her aunt is old and scared and most of the time tired. Time has creased wrinkles into the plains of her cheeks, weathered steel in her heart. "Don't," she says, and doesn't turn around.  
  
There is a man with eyes like stars, shivering silver in the night. His mother and father are dead. His everything is dead.  
  
There was a tree in a forest deep in England somewhere, and then there was a blue box in a garden. And a little girl, and an old, old man. Two living souls in a wide, wide universe, but connected somehow. Connected.   
  
  
  
  
**Third**.  
  
The blue box landed in the garden, and the little girl ran out to the old man, and in that moment prayers were answered and God was born. He saw himself in her, and she in him, and in the end that's how friendships are made. Slivers of a mirror in another living soul.  
  
"Be back in five minutes," said the man, the kind of sentence that isn't meant to be a promise. It became one anyway.  
  
What he didn't know, our star-crossed lover of an old, old man, what he didn't know was that in this time, this half hour maybe, he had become her everything. Already her best friend, already the type of person whose promises are counted on to be kept. He didn't know. He spent twelve years breaking her heart.  
  
In the end, the story goes that there was an old man and there was a little girl, a little girl who grew up with her insides twisted into knots like the proud gray branches of an English oak. And the truth, the truth is _always_ that they were both alone. And living in a universe far too wide and far too lonely. So they held hands, warm and sweaty palms pressed tight together, and ran.  
  
  
  
  
**Fourth**.  
  
Amy chews her breakfast in the morning with her mouth open, loud, smacking jaw and heavy eyes. The colored cereal stains her teeth red and blue and green, sugar-sweet taste on her tongue all day. She rests her chin in the palm of one hand, rests her elbow on the table, numbly observes the rise and fall of her jaw as she chews. Her green eyes are slitted closed. She's not a morning person.  
  
The Doctor saunters into the kitchen on a cloud, twirling his way through the threshold, wrinkling his nose at her sugary meal and beelining for the toast. He likes toast.   
  
"I'll tell you what the greatest human invention of the twentieth century is," he often offers, all seriousness. "It isn't the television, and it isn't the automobile, and no, it is _not_ the Internet, _honestly_." (He huffs.) "Here's what it is: are you ready?" (She's ready.) "The toaster." (By now he's positively gushing with glee.) "Do you want to know _why_ the toaster is the greatest twentieth-century invention of human origin?" ( _Hmrghumf_ , Amy might grumble.) "I'll tell you: because it's _magical_. In goes bread, out comes toast! Where does the bread go? Nobody knows! _Magic_ ," and he bops her nose.   
  
("Doctor," Amy once tried to explain, "they've got, like, little heaters on the inside, yeah? To toast the bread, you see? It isn't ma—" But he sidled up close and leaned his forehead into hers and clasped her arms to her shoulders so she went very, very quiet, and he whispered, "Sshh, Amy. _Magic_.")  
  
"Wouldn't you rather some toast?" the Doctor poses, plunging down the lever on the toaster and whirling around. "Toast is good. Toast is very good. Good, good toast."  
  
"Hmrghumf," Amy grumbles.  
  
The Doctor tilts his head to one side, hands landing behind him on the countertop as he crosses his ankles. "You're just _lovely_ in the mornings, have I told you?" and there's just the inkling of a smirk quirking up his lips, and that's when Amy's had enough—she heaves herself up and lunges at him so he laughs and twists out of her prying grasp, "I'm—not—a—morning—person—" and a smile itching at the back of her teeth.  
  
And that, that’s how people fall in love.  
  
  
  
  
**Fifth**.  
  
There was a little girl with hair like fire whose insides were twisted when she was seven years old. She grew up broken, her heart and lungs and stomach all tangled up inside her, achey, wrong. _She's fallen in love with her Raggedy Doctor_ , her aunt used to say to nosy neighbors, but she was so wrong, so terribly wrong, because Amy'd done so much more than fall in love. She'd fallen in everything. She loved him every way there was to be loved.  
  
But he was gone, and he was gone, and he was gone. She saw therapists and she bit therapists and the world told her she was crazy, and eventually, she stopped fighting them. Never stopped believing, really. Never stopped loving, though she tried. Sometimes it would swell up in her chest like an ocean tide, bright and strong and frightening, the faith, the loneliness, the godawful love, and she would have to swallow it down hard so the words wouldn't bubble over, _I hope_ and _I miss_ and _I love_ , and that's why her heart wasn't where it's supposed to be.  
  
There was a little girl who grew up broken, and then, and _then_ , there was a boy who grew up fixing her. He fixed her and he fixed her and he fixed her until all that was left was a white line of silk, ring of lace trailing behind a head of fire-red hair.  
  
But even with a circle of gold wound tight, wound _promising_ around her finger, her heart still beat in all the wrong places.  
  
  
  
  
**Sixth**.   
  
In the end, the story goes that there was an old man and there was a little girl, and there were lots of stories in between. A galaxy of stars splayed out before her like a bed of roses, blooming, rising, _hers_ , and him inside her as she curled her toes, wrapped her legs and sighed. She was ten billion, five thousand and twenty-three light years from Earth. Her lungs, her stomach, her _heart_ were like golden constellations, perfectly aligned.  
  
And then life moved quickly and it moved harshly, and God died without the voice of thunder sounding in the heavens, and the boy who fixed her loved her till she loved him back.  
  
  
"You promised," Amy tells Him once, her lavender nail scratching the slick surface of a round red apple, curled up taunt in the folds of an armchair. It's green, and it's old, and Rory bought it at a yard sale. They've put it in the living room, and it's theirs now. "You promised five minutes, and you made me so lonely." She bites into the apple, white teeth tearing at the skin of it, and she's gotten so good at nonchalance but she's gotten good at biting, too.  
  
The Doctor smiles weakly— _weakly_ is the only way he ever smiles anymore, and sometimes it makes her so angry she could strangle him, scream, force him to remember how to grin like he used to. She wonders what about it makes her so furious, and has a sneaking suspicion it's because she knows it's her own fault.   
  
He gestures around the room with one hand, the glass coffee table, the identical lamps, the clean stone bookcases, the vintage red-oak piano they never use. He meets her eyes—so rare now, the eye contact on these visits. (So rare, these visits.) And it's been years since he touched her forehead, since he pulled her close by the nape of her neck, fingers pressing into bone and tangling in red hair. (That's her own doing, she keeps trying to remind herself. She made her choice.) He looks less soft than before, slant bones beneath his eyes and the rigid set of his lips. The star-crossed old man who's lost his lover.  
  
"You've made _me_ lonely," he says. And it's very soft, and very plain, and something about the placid way his voice shapes around the words makes the heart in Amy's chest start beating off its rhythm once again.  
  
  
  
  
**Seventh**.  
  
Somewhere deep in an English forest there’s a tree. On a quiet Saturday a lumberjack plods through the woods and cuts it down to build a home, cuts down one more and thinks, _Maybe a piano with this one_.


End file.
